Cheryl Hung

Cloud Native London December 2020: featuring Solo.io, Nectar, and Red Sift


Joining us for a lively December Cloud Native London virtual meetup via Zoom, Rambly, and the YouTube/Twitch livestreams were three great speakers from Solo.io, Nectar, and Red Sift.

We are immensely grateful to Tecknuovo, Humio, and Palo Alto Networks for your enthusiastic and generous support and sponsorship.

Overview

Denis Jannot from Solo.io stepped in at short notice to kick off our first talk for the evening discussing The challenges of exposing and connecting microservices (starting at 23:09). His takeaways are that:

  • You can expose your applications running on Kubernetes with an Ingress, but you quickly find out that you need an API Gateway (more security options, advanced transformations, …)
  • Securing Service to Service communications is the next step after securing the Edge. And s Service Mesh is becoming the new standard way to achieve that
  • WebAssembly is the future of Envoy. It will allow people to extend Envoy to manipulate requests coming from the Edge or between the services

Next up was Xavier Millot from who asked about Nectar Sharing Kubernetes Apps: Can we do Better? (starting at 52:59). He talked about:

  • In handing over a Kubernetes application to a stranger for self hosting, Helm charts and Operators are the bare minimum. If you don’t document or codify the app’s k8s-level operation, the user will have a bad time.
  • What you put into the world, you should follow up on. How are you getting telemetry back from your Kubernetes apps?
  • The 20% rule. While only a minority of your paying customers may use self-hosted versions of your software, they can account for shares of revenue comparable to SaaS customers.

Finally, we returned from our break with Peter Parkanyi from Red Sift who talked about Moving to the cloud with evidence (starting at 1:36:34). His takeaways mentioned that:

  • Moving to the cloud is an interdisciplinary action, and requires a fair amount of planning and experimentation to find the right approach that suits the organization
  • Understanding our systems is key to improving them. Monitoring the right parts plays a key part in understanding, and will give confidence in moving forward.
  • The new infrastructure has no boundaries, and ensuring security and compliance will require a different way to think about our infrastructure, similar to securing our teams while working from home.

And before we close, our three speakers this month:

And a group photo from Rambly!

Cloud Native London January

Our next meetup will be Wednesday 6th January, when we’ll be joined by speakers from Sainsburys, Hazelcast, and Exelerys. RSVP and save the date now!

Stay safe and see you soon!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)